What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

William Shakespeare
"Romeo and Juliet" Act 2, Scene 2

I read these words for the first time decades ago, in a class taught by an irreverent high school teacher whose horrible puns were mollified only by his easy, gap-toothed smile. To a young, impressionable, transgender woman, the concept that language could be fluid was both intoxicating and anathema.

My parents gave me a name they chose and treated me as the gender they chose. I had no say in the matter. But Juliet's couplet promised escape. I had only to reject the authority of my parents' language, a quest that took almost 40 years to complete.

Today, entire political battles are fought over language. One group claims pronouns must be "scientifically accurate" in order to warrant use. Another group claims definitions must include everything, and exclude language from meaning anything.

In the middle is a well-meaning man who interviewed me. He is truly interested in learning about the transgender experience. But as an English major in college, he was confused by gender-neutral language, including the use of "they / them" as singular pronouns.

When thinking about himself, my interviewer said using "he / him" simply made sense. After all, he knows he's a "he" and has known all his life. But "they" was foreign to him. He found a sanctity in language that should be violated only for the best of reasons. A person knowing they're a "they" didn't qualify.

We never reached a consensus on how language should be used or changed, but here I will present at least some of our discussion on the topic.

Grammatical gender

When considering whether "they" should exist as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun, the first obvious question to ask is whether all languages use gendered pronouns at all. Clearly, the answer is no.

Finno-Ugric languages, including Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian, never developed grammatical gender. From twelve-year old girls to objects that are pink to your pair of shoes to a banana, every noun, adjective, and article is given the same gender-neutral treatment.

Calling humans the equivalent of "it" may sound dehumanizing to native speakers of languages with grammatical gender. Finns, however, see it as walking the talk of "all men are created equal" (although in Finnish, the gender-neutral construction would be "all häns are created equal").

Admittedly, only 0.3% of global population speaks a Finno-Ugric language, but before we assume only uncommon languages have no gendered pronouns, consider this: Japanese uses pronouns that wrap gender presentation with age, social status, and the relationship of the person to the speaker. Pronouns are more subtle and expansive than "he," "she," and "they."

Chinese - one of the most highly spoken languages in the world - only uses vaguely gendered pronouns, and those only in the written form. Practically speaking, there are no detectable differences in gender in the spoken form, which leads linguists to assert Chinese effectively has no grammatical gender.

Is there any benefit to grammatical gender in languages that developed it?

My pen is a she

Some languages are perfectly understandable without grammatical gender. Is the same true of Romantic languages, especially Spanish? How did Romantic languages become so gendered if grammatical gender is not a universal feature of languages?

We could simply blame Latin for being such a silly language, but it's a question worth considering. For instance, if my interviewer were to write with pen and paper at a table while listening to music, these words would be used:

• Él - the masculine pronoun with which my interviewer identifies so strongly
• La Pluma - the pen, a feminine noun
• El Papel - the paper, a masculine noun
• La Mesa - the table, a feminine noun
• El Radio / La Radio - the radio, a noun that can be masculine or feminine, depending on the speaker's preference

We understand the writer as "he." But why is the paper also masculine? Does the writer bear any similarity to the paper, but not to the pen? Is the pen similar to the table? And why does the writer get to choose the gender of the radio when he can't choose with the other nouns?

In truth, there is no intrinsic reason the pen, the table (and the radio) are feminine, just as there is no intrinsic reason the writer, the paper (and the radio) are masculine. Language does not categorize nouns and pronouns by intrinsic properties of gender.

Why not? Because there is no intrinsic masculine or feminine property in any of the objects, including the writer. The objects were chosen to be labeled masculine or feminine in the same formalization of language that occurred in English.

Languages are composed of conventions

Why is "la pluma" feminine? Why is "they" typically plural? Why shouldn't sentences end with a preposition or infinitives be split?

The answer is simple: because. Because people using the language decided that's how the grammar should work.

There are no intrinsic qualities of grammar. There is only the convention of the social environment's use of language. Even the writer is labeled with a pronoun and adjective that people decided should apply to others like him.

Perhaps you protest at a process that nebulous. Perhaps you cry out that science must be involved. After all, science continually refines intrinsic concepts of matter and objects as we learn more about the Universe. How much has science affected language?

In Spanish, the word "el papel" is traced to the 16th Century CE - toward the end of the Middle Ages - when science was certainly not the driving force of society. For reference, "they" as a singular pronoun is found in English even a bit earlier in history.

Language is anything but scientific, nor is it bound by the laws of the Universe. Attempts to call pronouns "scientifically accurate" will need to include research into the feminine nature of the table currently holding up the paper for my pen.

Humans, not grammar

In the end, language is developed to serve humans, not the other way around. Humans need to communicate, and we develop symbols to facilitate communication. While science may refine concepts labeled by symbols of language, rarely will it refine features of the language itself.

Instead, gender in language - if it exists at all - is derived from social conventions that later are formalized by linguists. I cannot explain why my pen is feminine, as I am, nor will I accept a detractor's misgendering as "scientific."

But I will remind my detractors that the word "gender" is believed to originate in proto-Indo-European (PIE), the parent language even of Latin, from which Spanish derives. In PIE, *gene- implied a family or tribe, not body parts. Identity developed from the people who accepted you as one of their own.

Understanding gender as a sense of collective acceptance may explain what happened with "la pluma," "el papel," and "la mesa." Perhaps the paper had a falling out with the table supporting it and the pen writing on it far in Latin's distant past.

For the sake of writers across time and space, I hope the words can make up and establish gender harmony in my journaling once again.